Modality Specific Contributions to Multimodal Social Recognition in Pair-Bonded Prairie Voles Público
Arslan, Danial (Spring 2020)
Abstract
Social encounters between animals often involve multiple sensory modalities with sensory cues containing information about the individual or about its affective state. A receiver’s responses are, therefore, contingent on both individually and contextually specific cues. Identifying the social information conveyed by different modes of sensory cues would help to understand how those cues are used in social communication to recognize conspecifics and/or their affect. One potential sensory channel is olfaction, with previous studies showing that rodents rely heavily on the pheromones in urine to identify potential mates and intruders. Another is audition, where ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) are known to be an important form of communication in mice and rats – both between adults and their pups as well as with each other. However, neither mice nor rats are known to have robust, long-term recognition of conspecifics, motivating exploration of these issues in other experimentally tractable rodent species with stronger prosocial interactions such as prairie voles. Here, we use adult prairie voles to analyze the role of audition and olfaction in social communication. These socially monogamous mammals form a life-long selective pair bond and collectively display complex prosocial behaviors, such as nest building. Therefore, we hypothesize that prairie voles not only use olfactory cues to, presumably, recognize their partners but also vocalize in the ultrasonic range to communicate with conspecifics. We first examine whether males recognize the odors of their partners and later investigate how they may display that recognition in both their investigative and vocal responses. We then look at whether emitted vocalizations might be used by receiving females to recognize their male partners. Hence, this work lays the groundwork for studying the neural bases of learning to recognize the social-sensory cues of a partner.
Table of Contents
Introduction...................................................................................................................................1
Methods.........................................................................................................................................7
Results..........................................................................................................................................29
Discussion………….........................................................................................................................38
References.....................................................................................................................................49
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